SOURCE: "Beyond Revulsion," in The New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1964, p. 67.

Fremont-Smith is an American critic who has worked for the New York Times, Saturday Review, and Village Voice. In the following review, he contends that although Last Exit to Brooklyn is a powerful and evocative work, its brutal and grotesque realism make it difficult for the average reader to stomach.

This is a brutal book—shocking, exhausting, depressing. At first thumb-through, it is simply repulsive, "Grove Press's extra special dirty book for fall," as Time called it. Yet the book is not that easily dismissable: the profound depression it causes—once one starts seriously to read it—is a measure of an authentic power which carries through and beyond revulsion. Just who should be asked to undergo this experience is another matter.

Last Exit to Brooklyn consists of six loosely connected stories written over recent years...